Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Stacy on November 21, 2011 at 8:50pm

Opposition to birth control often has to do with wanting to control female sexuality and to control women in general. When a woman has access to birth control, that gives her time to do other things other than just taking care of her children. Some people feel very threatened by this, even in some developed countries. I remember a few years ago being on a discussion forum where some of the European conservatives were saying that women were being selfish for having careers and not having more children.

 

I agree with Maruli Marulaki that it is truly terrible that so many women in the world don't have access to birth control and that they don't have a say in family planning and sexual matters. I have always felt so badly for these women, and for the unwanted children too. Many of these women would choose to have fewer children if given the option.

Permalink Reply by sk8eycat on January 29, 2012 at 9:03pm

Stacy, I was going to add a comment months ago, and got sidetracked.  (Boy did I EVER!)

Anyroad, have you ever seen some men's reaction(s) when you suggest they have their male dogs neutered?  A few just get that "deer in the headlights" look...but it's the other reaction that's pathetic.  (And people wonder where all those puppies in the pound come from.)

They really take it personally.

 

Permalink Reply by Jackie McClanahan on January 29, 2012 at 6:36pm

I'm pretty sure most statistics agree that at least half the pregnancies in the USA were not planned. I know that includes my brother and me.

Permalink Reply by Maruli Marulaki on November 9, 2011 at 7:16am

Thanks for the link.   Anne Gaylor has certainly done very beneficial work.  

Permalink Reply by Jackie McClanahan on January 29, 2012 at 6:12pm

I've thought of this quite often. In fact, if I ever come into some extra cash (and it's tempting to use my tax returns for this), I want to set up a booth outside of WalMart or some other area with a lot of traffic and pass out free condoms of various sizes and types and some pamphlets on birth control from my local Planned Parenthood, with a jar for donations if they are so inclined. I plan on getting into a career in sexuality education, and creating or being a part of a charity such as this would be wonderful.

Permalink Reply by Becoming Other on February 15, 2012 at 9:46pm

I think this is a very complex topic.  Here on Atheist Nexus I know that I can say things very critical about breeding and very critical about theism.  In countless other venues I have gotten in a great deal of trouble for expressing such views.

 

There is a big big difference between the industrialized world and the pre-industrial world.  There are differences in resource consumption per capita, as has already been pointed out.  There are also big differences in family life, how gender identity is construed, and in the factors which go into why people have children.

 

I will start by offering one particular point.  I had read about this years ago and I've had long discussions about it with people from Planned Parenthood.  Most of the unplanned teenage pregnancies in the US occur to girls who know all about contraception and have full access to it.  Better I should say, both partners know all about contraception and have full access to it.  So why does this happen?  Well, they are just swept away in the moment, they have fantasies, and at least for a time they don't care about pregnancy.

 

For a girl to be prepared with contraception means that she has to be planning to have sex.  For many, this is not really allowed.  They are not pillars of ivory and so they have the potential of submitting.  But planning on it they would feel to be wrong.  Also, the idea that their male partner is to be held responsible is always in the back of their mind.

 

Now I don't want to focus only on the girls.  The males just seem to check out, stop thinking rationally as well.

 

If our culture was more sex positive, I mean if more teenagers were having more sex with more people who they know more casually, then there may actually be less pregnancies!  That is, as you move further from conservative constraints, sex without procreation becomes more a reality.  The more you neutralize the gender politics, the lower the pregnancy rate.

 

Okay, but now let me shift to talk about something else.  If you look at pre-industrial countries, their practices are much more conservative.  Pregnancy is the way that women secure a husband and adult status.  ( This kind of talk got me in lots of trouble other places. )

 

I have seen this done in the US!  Someone from a third world country found a younger and more attractive and more Americanized rival going after her long term boyfriend.

 

Well, there was only one thing to do:

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=oops

 

I have in times since gone on to discuss this subject of oopsing on Child Free Forums.  Even there it is extremely gender divisive.

 

With the case in question, what then followed were 8 months of intense hysterical telephone calls to the sister of the man.  The brow beating was on.  There was an attempt to get from the sister to the man's parents, to ratchet up the pressure further.

 

The telephone calls and the hysteria continued until she was about 2 weeks from delivery and just didn't have the surplus energy anymore.  There was an attempt to bring me into the loop.  She was screaming threats that she was not going to "give this baby to him."  Meaning, she was not going to identify him and not us his name on the birth certificate.  So I was supposed to advise if she could do that.  I told her "Yes, but that would be real stupid and expensive to fix."  I told her that she could separate from him and move out, but do not play games with the birth certificate.

 

Anyway, as you can see, I don't think much of this girl.   ( The last place I talked about any of this was a Recovery Movement Forum, where such talk was not allowed.  I said that my mother only had children to give herself an adult identity.   So I was accused of making remarks hurtful to women and then I was expelled.  )

 

But in all fairness, this oppser was an immigrant to the US.  She was in an underclass status and so she was fearful.

 

If this was actually happening in a third world pre-industrial country, the behavior standards would be different.  They wouldn't have a word for oopsing, because such would just be standard procedure.  Everyone would accept that.

 

For myself, definitely having children for my mother was a means to become an accepted adult, and also a means of denying the pains of her own childhood.

http://www.nospank.net/fyog19.htm#afterword

 

She actually went against social norms of the time and for her conservative religious culture, by delaying for my father to graduate from college.  Seems he was not really on board for this, and really was in no hurry to graduate.  As marital life unfolded, he tried to avoid my mother, and he admitted this.

 

But still he was brow beat into doing his husbandly duty, and in a way into doing fatherly duties.

 

Is any of this good?  Hell NO!

 

With the oopser it seems not to have worked out as bad as I had expected.

 

For my mother and her "wanted children" it was a crazy nightmare situation.

 

To speak more about this I want to invoke what I see as the most important text, Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus.  I hope to be writing more about this book soon.

 

They speak of The Family and they are clear that what they mean is specific to the age of industrial capitalism.  Really its the age of Freud, and its the middle class.

 

As they explain, the middle class family is a simulacra of simulacra.  An its also pursued in Bad Faith.

 

Simulacra of Simulacra means that images are created, Capitalism does this.  So it creates images of The Family.  These are adapted from families of pre-industrial times.  There is a Rouseausim going on here, treating it as though these things are natural, reifying them.

 

Then individuals try to imitate that, to gain social status.  So its two levels of imitation.

 

Its Bad Faith because the people don't admit to themselves that they do have other choices.  My parents both could have done other things, if they were less timid, less parent pleasing, and less afraid of facing their own childhood pain.  They did not have to have me, just so that they could use me and pat themselves on the back.

 

Every time there is another economic bubble, thinking gets more conservative and the birth rate goes up.  Susan Faludi writes this about the 80's in her magnificent book, "Backlash" the war against American women.  What she is speaking about is the commercial world's attacks on the feminism of the 1970's, with its "New Domesticity".  It also means a higher birth rate.

 

Each time there is an economic bubble, there is a new generation of liberal pedagogy manuals.  In my day it was Dr. Spock.  Today these books  deal with things like Attachment, Empathy, and Natural.  Always they are telling you that you don't have to experience childhood pain or adult stigma, you can just become a parent.  You can pat yourself on the back because you do what it says in this book, so you are a good parent.

 

 

Watch this, it makes me feel sick!  She is using her children so that she does not have to feel, not feel her own pains.

http://omg.yahoo.com/blogs/goddess/spotlight-nightlight-mayim-biali...

Her book will be on store shelves soon.

 

I stand with Alice Miller who opposed all pedagogy.  Liberal pedagogy still serves to make the parents right and protect them from their own feelings.  It still lets them use the child!

 

 

So notice, moderate increases to contraceptive access do not factor in to any of this.

 

A child, wanted or unwanted.  Well if wanted, wanted FOR WHAT?

 

 

Sure, if you did what religious conservatives fear most, then I think there would be a change.  If you passed out contraceptives to every child when the entered the 7th grade, or maybe the 6th grade, and told them that they should wait no longer and get right down to it, and arranged places for them to do so, then yes, the pregnancy rate would drop, and most everything else about our society would change.  The gender politics would be completely different.

 

Are their any bright signs in my view here?  Yes, the number of child free people is increasing.  But what is increasing even more are the  number of single mothers.   I my opinion they are a whole hell of a lot better than the women I have described above.

 

 

I do favor support for contraceptive distribution.  The reason there is less is because of the role of religion in US politics.  There was some federal law to prohibit the US from being involved in overseas Family Planning programs.  This was George W. Bush's doing.

 

But always religion has been opposed to this.

 

I would like to see research to get ideal contraception.  That is, you have it for both genders.  It is 100% effective and also 100% cancelable.  No one can tell if it is being used.  I think this could be obtained if people wanted it.

 

We have always had contraception, at least as long as people have lived in cities and worshiped dieties.  Its just that the knowledge was restricted.   I feel that the Cathar's were using contraception and that this is why they were burned.   This is why huge numbers of women were burned as witches in the following century.  This is why Catholicism then went to the very strict total prohibition on contraception coming from St. Augustine.

 

Becoming Other

http://freedomtoexpress.freeforums.org/

Permalink Reply by Becoming Other on February 18, 2012 at 3:01pm

P.S. Planned Parenthood was started in the US, but now it is an international birth control charity. The United States government used to do overseas family planning assistance, but this changed as religious conservatives gained more and more political power. I'm hoping that G. W. Bush was the worst of it.

 

The U.N. would be more active, its just that it gets negative pressure and refusal to pay dues from the U.S.

 

Terms like "family planning" are euphamisms because people are uncomfortable with the idea that sex can legally, ethically, and morally be separated from conception.

 

Planned Parenthood had originally been called American Birth Control League.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_Parenthood

 

 

BO

Permalink Reply by sk8eycat on February 19, 2012 at 12:23am

I just sent the following to about 20 friends:

Hi,
 
After Planned Parenthood and the Susan G. Komen Foundation, it's clear that women's rights are under attack. Join us at One Million Strong for Women in taking stand for women's rights, women's health, and women's freedom.

 

Click here to join this fight right away: http://www.democratsenators.org/o/44/p/dia/action/public/?action_KE...

************************************************

The letter below was addressed to me, so you need to read it and then click on the link ABOVE to sign the petition.  And then forward it.  PLEASE! 

 

(If we advocate spaying and neutering our pets, we ought to think about doing the same for ourselves if we do not plan to breed.)

 

KTHXBAI

***********************

You’ve probably already seen this picture going around the internet: It’s a photo of the all-male panel that House Republicans called to testify at a hearing on contraception and women’s health on Thursday. As my friend, Rep. Carolyn Maloney put it, “Where are the women?” And this hearing came on the same day that one of the major financiers behind GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum suggested women use aspirin for contraception by "put[ting] it between their knees." It’s outrageous -- and even more reason that we need 2012 to be the next Year of the Woman! Add your name to "One Million Strong for Women" today, and show the far right we will not accept these attacks on women's rights. But it gets even worse. Twenty Republican senators have now signed on as cosponsors of the “Blunt Amendment,” a measure that would allow an employer to deny coverage for any health care service to anyone -- women, men, or children -- for any reason, even services that can save a life. You don't have to be a religiously affiliated institution. You don't even need to have a religious objection. No matter how important or life saving the health care service is, if it is against your "moral conviction," then you don't have to offer it. Period. Passage of the Blunt Amendment could block millions of employees from life-saving health coverage, just because their boss says so. If your boss believed STD’s are a result of immorality, they could deny screenings and treatment that could save your life. If your boss believed that women should only have children when married, they could deny prenatal and maternity care. If your boss didn’t believe mental health treatment was appropriate, they could deny you coverage no matter how severe the condition -- even if that denial results in homicide or suicide. This dangerous amendment is a broadside attack on health care coverage for all Americans -- and it’s an even more egregious attack in the GOP's War on Women. We need to speak out now, before this amendment comes up for a vote in the Senate. Add your name to "One Million Strong for Women" today, and show the far right we will not accept these attacks on health care and women's rights. I am amazed that now, in 2012, Republicans would have us go back to the medical dark ages. But that’s exactly what they’re trying to do. Since 12 of my colleagues and I launched "One Million Strong for Women" last week, over 200,000 people have added their names and made their voices heard. But to reach one million, and to create the undeniable grassroots force we'll need to speak out for women's health, we need more than your signature. So, once you've added your name, make sure to share our action with your friends on Facebook and Twitter, and help us reach one million strong to stand up for women's rights. Thank you for your support, and for adding your name today. In friendship, Barbara Boxer U.S. Senator

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